Language: Chinese

Every year since 2007, the College Board and Asia Society have joined forces to host the annual National Chinese Language Conference (NCLC). Today it has grown to become the largest conference of its kind in North America, and it has become one of the premier forums for sharing ideas and best practices related to Chinese language and culture education.

Almost all young Czechs know some English now compared with the early 1990s and the latest experience shows that the knowledge of one more foreign language is an advantage on the job market, depending on business trends that now put emphasis on Spanish, Russian and Chinese, daily Pravo writes Friday.

Chinese is one of the six official languages of the world body along with French, Spanish, Russian, English and Arabic. The UN Department of Public Information (DPI) introduced language days in 2010 to celebrate each official language and encourage cultural diversity and mutual understanding.

A new infographic shows that Chinese will soon overtake English as the dominant language online. At the end of 2011, 27 percent of web content was in English, while 24 percent was in Chinese. Despite that, the graphic’s creators, the digital agency Smartling, lament that the web is still not bilingual enough, with “56 percent of online content [being] English-only.”

When Shen Yuning announced he was planning to compile a Swahili-Chinese dictionary, most of his friends thought he was joking. Since that online post in December, Shen has compiled nearly 5,000 words, working at least 15 hours a day in Kenya and Tanzania with help from some Africans.

Mandarin is slowly becoming the second language of business, according to not one, not two, but three articles in The New York Times over the weekend. A front-page story in Sunday`s paper noted that high-end retailers have begun to employ salespeople who speak Chinese to handle the rising numbers of well-funded tourists from the People`s Republic.

Critic Zhi An believes Arai is probably the only non-native speaker of Chinese capable of writing creatively in the language. Her books, mainly collections of short stories and essays, attract a large readership, cutting across age groups. They love her honesty and insight in describing cross-cultural experiences.

The Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council (OCAO) will cooperate with foreign education authorities to position Chinese-language education as a mainstream education choice abroad, said Li Haifeng, the OCAO director, at a meeting attended by overseas Chinese social organizations from across the world.

“When you translate one language into another, there are many challenges,” Xue says. “Chinese words, for example, have no spaces between them. One of the first things that must be done is enter spacing that indicate word boundaries, a process called ‘word segmentation.’”

CHAIL (Himachal Pradesh): Now the cadets studying at one of the oldest Rashtriya Military School (RMS) of country at Chail in Himachal Pradesh would learn Chinese language. Ministry of Defence (MOD), which is running the schools, has introduced the Chinese language in the study curriculum of the school from current academic session.

Seven years ago, President Ts.Elbegdorj shocked Mongolians by announcing that the nation would become bilingual, with English as the second language. Mongolian is a relatively small language, landlocked between two international giants, Russian and Chinese. As Elbegdorj pointed, English would be the definitive tool to open windows on the wider world.

Children who grow up learning to speak two languages are better at switching between tasks than are children who learn to speak only one language, according to a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. However, the study also found that bilinguals are slower to acquire vocabulary than are monolinguals, because bilinguals must divide their time between two languages while monolinguals focus on only one.

The excavations carried out at Yinxu and the finding of the oracle bones significantly changed China's historical records. The inscriptions on these bones are the precursor of modern Chinese calligraphy, according to Tang Jigen, a researcher with the Institute of Archeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

FOUR Shanghai dialect "spokesmen" yesterday stepped into a downtown studio after a one-year recruitment to make audio records of the city's fast-fading mother tongue. They were asked to read words, phrases and sentences aloud after chatting freely in Shanghai dialect for about an hour.

About 50,000 students are enrolled in dual-language programs in California, state Department of Education officials say, and about half of them are English learners. Ninety percent of the programs offer Spanish as the second language, followed by Mandarin (4 percent), Korean (3 percent) and other languages (3 percent).

One of the first things Regiina Nohova had to learn when she moved to the Czech Republic was how to open her mouth wider when she spoke. As a native-born Estonian, she simply wasn't in the habit. "In Estonia, we speak slowly," she said. "We almost don't open our mouths when we speak. We don't have to articulate the words. It's our nature. It's colder there, and people spend more time inside, and that's why we're like this.

...One of those courses is biology, taught by teacher Fan Fang, who, with both a Chinese language credential and biology content credential, is a bit of a rare find. Finding teachers like Fang is one of the biggest barriers to expanding dual-language programs into the upper grades.

To interact with the remote teacher, such as Liang, students can turn on their own web cameras and click on a button that is the equivalent of hand-raising. At that point, the teacher can “call” on the student and share a split-screen webcam window with the student while they either ask or answer a question or make a statement.

A recent USA Today College poll indicated that 44% of students would enroll in a Spanish course for their next foreign language course. The numbers quickly tapper off after that — with Chinese being the second most popular language at 11%, and Arabic attracting 9% of students. Closely trailing are the three languages that are commonly found in universities across the country —- at least at the beginner level: German, French, and Italian all tallied in 8% each.

From Chula Vista to Laguna Niguel and Sacramento, public schools are creating dual-language immersion programs at a fast pace. The California Department of Education estimates there are 318 bilingual immersion programs in the state, up from 201 in 2006.

In anticipation of Apple’s (AAPL) introduction of Siri in Chinese this year, I decided to try Dragon, a line of smartphone voice apps by Nuance Communications (NUAN)—the company behind the speech-recognition technology that powers Siri. It comes in a number of languages, including Mandarin Chinese.

About 4,000 students of Tibetan schools in three counties in Qinghai Province have staged demonstrations on Mar 14 to protest against a possible shift to Chinese as the medium of teaching all the non-language subjects, reported RFA.org (Radio Free Asia, Washington) Mar 14. The protests were reported to have occurred in schools in Rebkong (in Chinese, Tongren), Tsekhog (Zeku) and Kangtsa (Gangcha) counties.

Under the Ministry of Education and Training’s plan, the teaching of the Hoa ethnic language at primary and secondary school levels aims to form and develop communication ability in the Hoa language among pupils of the Hoa ethnic group, as well as help them gain a fundamental knowledge of the language and culture of the group.

As computers become more widely used and handwriting is used less, the need to know how to write Chinese characters is decreasing. Computers represent a fundamental shift in the way students produce the written Chinese language, and have led to what is now being termed character amnesia. Some students are literally forgetting how to write. This starts with the most complex, least used characters, and works down from there.

It has been suggested that the decision to include Mandarin alongside the two other 'priority' languages - French and Spanish - was driven by calls for children to be prepared for a global economy dominated by China.

...in addition to English, people in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar are interested in studying Thai. Many Thais also express interest in learning regional languages to promote cultural understanding. Consequently, in 2010 the government initiated a multilingual programme in border area schools at the Mathayom (Grade 6-12) level to teach the Lao, Khmer, Myanmar and Vietnamese languages.

As fewer students enroll in Indonesian language classes at Australian universities, more foreigners are signing up for them at schools in Indonesia. “From my observations from year to year, the number of foreign students who want to learn Indonesian is increasing,” Gumilar Rusliwa Somantri, the rector of the University of Indonesia, said on Monday.

The amount of Arabic on the Internet — 3% of all sites in 2011 — has increased by 2500% since 2000. Similarly, Russian’s current 3% share is up 1800% in the last decade. China added more Internet users in three years than people in the U.S. And China, India, Iran, Nigeria and Russia have added the most new Internet users in the last five years.